Zack's voice echoed through the foggy pain that encased Tanner's mind. "Evening. Finally awake?"
"Oh God… what happened?" The thin blanket fell off as he struggled to sit upright. The first thing that he noticed was the silence. It was an eerie, almost unnatural sensation almost like the world had just stopped. The wind was gone, or at least inaudible. The void created by its absence was massive. It had been a constant since even before he had found Beth and Conner at the riverbank, acting as a harsh backdrop for his actions and struggles. The two windows in the room, what looked to be a recording studio of sorts, still showed snow wafting sluggishly down to earth against the pure blackness of true night. His surroundings were unfamiliar and foreign, brought into the realm of light only by the errant dancing of the campfire's flames.
Lucy and Eddie were lounging around at the studio's door. Zack sat on the other side of the fire, waiting patiently. "You passed out when we got into the car," Zack informed him. "We set up camp in this radio station for the night. I carried you inside."
"Oh," he moaned. "Well thanks."
"Alright Tanner. Let's get this out of the way now. Is there anything you want to say?"
"What?"
"You heard me. Anything you feel that I should know, Tanner?" Tanner unconsciously twitched at the emphasis given to his name.
He couldn't find the power to speak. A dark cloud hung low over his head, cutting off any attempts to speak as the giant stared him down. Meeting Zack's eyes with his own was a struggle in itself as a voice whispered in his ear that the already unsettling scene was about to get worse.
They stared for what seemed like hours with Zack's cool eyes reaching out and attempting to pry… something out of Tanner. He sensed that it was something he would rather keep to himself.
Zack reached down, keeping his eyes on Tanner. "Fine." His hand came up with a dark leather wallet held for Tanner to see. He recognized it instantly. It was his.
Tanner said nothing.
Zack tossed the wallet over the fire to Tanner, dropping his voice to an earthy rumble. "Just remember that I gave you a chance to come clean, Jack."
The verbal hammerblow impacted his guts with a quaking force. His throat seized up, cutting off his breath as the world began to spin around him. Drops of sweat formed on his forehead even though it was the dead of winter. His attempt to pick up the wallet failed when his arms, shaking, let go as if of their own accord just when a wave of heat embraced him and turned his skin red. Stuttering, unstable, he wasn't able to speak so much as let random words spill forth in flimsy attempts to explain away a name that, to him, was almost as evil as Lynch.
Zack looked on at Tanner's struggling from his seat a few feet in front of him. "So Jack, can you tell me, exactly, what's going on?"
"Why, why, why me?"
"Why what, Jack?"
"He's doing it again, oh Christ, he won't let me go." He screamed in his head. That mental voice that was always whispering over his shoulder gave out a tremendous, bloodcurdling yelp. Tanner could hear Lynch, that murderer, that psychopath, he could hear his black laughter slither up from the deepest, darkest pit of Hell. All spite, all hate, pure evil. He knew now, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Lynch's spectre would haunt him for the rest of his days. He would never be free.
His breathing was still out of his control. Through the dizziness he managed to grab his wallet and stand, swaying on fragile legs with Lynch's mad cackling trying to beat him back down. "I'll… I'll just… go, okay? I can-"
"You can sit," Zack grumbled. "You can sit, and shut up, and tell me what's going on. We lay our cards on the table. No more secrets. From any of us. Okay?" Tanner obeyed, his muscles turning into one massive knot of tension.
"But I can still go-"
"No." Lucy's voice, constricting, coiled around his heart. "You're staying and you're talking. No. More. Lies. Who are you for real, and what the fuck happened to my family?" Her hand dropped to her holster and rested snugly on the grip of her pistol. "No more bullshit."
In a jittery, uneven voice he stumbled through the story while Zack and Lucy's cutting stares tore at him. Eddie simply stood there, watching it all unfold before him. "I was part of this group. In the early days. A militia that tried to fight the walkers." Zack nodded. "I was just some random electrician that got recruited when the dead came back. Our leader, a guy named Daniel Lynch, knew we needed as many people as we could get if we wanted to beat the walkers so he ordered us to… 'draft' them into our little army."
"Go on, Jack."
The panic was gone now. It had disappeared along with the wind. In its place was nothing but a deep seeded, brooding depression as his story flowed like a gloomy river. "He was insane. He wanted us to take back a city from them. Dawson, Georgia. After we lost so many people trying to hold it in the first weeks."
"And you helped him?" Zack asked.
Tanner's nod was almost invisible. "Yeah. I stood by for over two months and let him and his killers enslave survivors and force them out on a suicide mission. Families, kids, the old, anyone that could use a gun."
Lucy stepped forward."Did they do that to Conner? What about Farley?"
"No," he said, despondent. "When I stood up to them they killed this family I was trying to help, and then they almost killed me. I met Conner and Farley a few weeks later. They were in another group, so I gave myself another name."
Nodding, Zack slid the shotgun off his lap and away from him. "Tanner."
"Yeah. I stopped being 'Jack Weller.' Jack stood by and let all of those people be 'drafted' into a lost cause because he was too afraid to do anything. I didn't want to be him anymore. I couldn't be that person."
"I don't care!" Lucy snapped. "What happened to Conner? Tell me what happened!"
The melancholy was overwhelming as Tanner went on. "I never told them about Lynch. Everything was fine for a long time, and then it all went wrong."
Zack spoke before Lucy could continue shouting. "This 'Lynch' guy found you?"
Tanner nodded. "When I left, I killed Dan Lynch's brother, Robert. He wanted revenge on me, so he tracked me for months. I didn't think he'd go so far to find me again. Lynch and everyone still with him had gone bandit by then."
Zack's eyes glowed with understanding as it began to fall into place before him. By the door Lucy was pacing back and forth, frantically turning the journal over and over in her hands. "And you blame yourself for that?" The large man asked.
He didn't bother answering. "We managed to take Lynch down, but not before our entire group was wiped out. Farley didn't make it." Lucy stopped pacing. She had become a statue, frozen to to the floor. "Not many of us did. Conner managed to survive, but he was different. I could see it just before we attacked Lynch and finished him off."
Lucy was still frozen as Zack spoke. "And you spent the last year searching for him?"
"Yes," Tanner said, at the verge of breaking down. "I found him, too."
Lucy moved again, turning back to Tanner. "No."
"Down by the river."
"Tanner, stop." Her voice quavered.
"Barely an hour or two before I met you guys."
"No. No no no no no, you're lying again." Her green eyes became watery. "You have to be lying. It's what you do."
"Lucy, I'm sorry."
"Not true, not true, it's not true."
All Tanner could do was look away. It broke her.
Tears dripped ever so slowly as she stormed out of the room and cast the journal aside with a backwards, red faced sneer directed at Tanner.
Eddie slipped through the door after her.
She seethed. Everything was red.
The bleak, dank hallways around her blurred into a single featureless background as she ripped at her hair from the depths of grief. The memories of her childhood, the one that she shared with Conner and Farley, were burning up. She could feel them transform and disintegrate into ash as she drowned in a sea of regret and loneliness. Her veins flowed with a raging inferno, boiling her blood as she clawed at her surroundings for something, anything, to grab on to as she sunk deeper and deeper into madness born of sorrow.
She should have found them. It wasn't supposed to happen like this. Nothing was right anymore. Everything she'd done had been for nothing. Her trek north from Statesboro looking for the two of them. Finding Wellington. Volunteering to join the Team to go back out and look for them while they should have been gathering supplies for the community.
The stupid risks she'd taken, all the times she'd almost died, all of it meant exactly nothing. Nothing. That was all she had left.
That piece of shit sitting by their fire in the room at the end of the hallway. That liar. That killer. He'd taken her family away from her.
Her hand slipped her gun out of its holster automatically, flipping the safety off in the same moment she stepped back toward the door at the end of the hallway.
Tanner, or Jack, or Fuckface, or whatever the Hell his name really was had robbed her of her family. Now she was going to take away everything from him.
From some place far away she heard Eddie call her name, but his voice was drowned out as everything around her turned black. It all vanished against her rage, disappearing into the sea of darkness she was drowning in. Before she submerged completely she was going to wrap her hands around that lying bastards neck and drag him down with her.
All she could see now was a tunnel. Wisps of red revealed themselves at the end of the black tunnel. Embers from the fire drifting away from their camp, taunting her with their soft, warm glowing each time she took an uneasy step.
"Lucy, stop!" Frantic, concerned, Eddie's voice pierced the veil like a razor. "Don't do it! Stop!"
She kept walking. Her fingers tightened around the gun until the grip threatened to crack.
"Please! Don't!"
Words were useless. She wouldn't be stopped by a stupid pot head with a shitty beanie. Not when she was so close. The end of the tunnel was in her reach. All she had to do was lean through the doorway, take aim, and pull the trigger. Then her brother and her fiance could finally rest.
Filled with a trepid determination, Eddie emerged from the edge of the darkness and stood in front of the door.
"Move." Her voice had forgotten the sarcastic, joking personality that she usually wore. All that remained was a fatal, deep seeded hatred that stretched its dark roots down into her soul.
"I'm not letting you do this," he trembled, crossing his arms. His feet were planted as surely as a statue's. Lucy's gun came up in a single, solid motion.
"I will end you," she growled, "If you don't move out of the way. He dies. Now."
He refused to budge. Terror shone in his eyes as he stared down the barrel of her gun, sensing the bullet resting in the chamber and waiting to be unleashed. But he stood there, shielding the door with an unwavering courage even as she put her finger on the trigger. "Listen," he asked with a high strung shrillness that betrayed his inner fear, "You're not a murderer. Lucy, this won't solve anything."
"This is justice," the woman hissed with a serpent-like rasp. "My brother? My fiance? That shitstain in there killed them with his lies." The gun began to sway. "Th-they're dead. I have nothing."
"He spent a year looking for your brother," he told her. "He saved Zack's life."
"He… he… I have nothing left, Eddie." Her vision blurred again, this time with tears instead of rage.
He inched forward, pleading with her. "Would they want you to kill him like this? Would they want you to be a murderer?"
"I've killed before," she sobbed. "I'll do it again. I'll do it."
"We've all killed," he reminded her with a whisper. "But you're not a murderer. And whatever happened to your family, they wouldn't want you to become one for them. Just… steady now… put it down…"
She charged. The gun slipped from her hand, clattering to the floor as she tried to run past him. He stepped into her path and the two collided, her tidal wave of grief smashing against his steadfast mountain of bravery.
It was enough. She collapsed against his chest, burying her face into his jacket as her stinging tears flowed freely from her eyes. She brought her fists down on his chest over and over, letting the rage and sadness filter out of her with each strike. Eddie stood there, silently enduring the blows as Lucy wept for the first time in years.
Tanner stood, intending to follow Eddie, but Zack pulled him back down.
"He might need help. Let me go, Zack."
"The last thing she needs is to see you right now," Zack told him. "Now sit down."
"This is my fault," Tanner insisted, standing again. "I'm going with him."
Exasperated, Zack grabbed Tanner's arm. "Do you know what she could do? You just told her you got her family killed. If she sees you now, she might decide to kill you."
Tanner tried to steal his arm back, meeting with failure as Zack kept a firm hold. "I don't care," he said. "It's what I deserve, isn't it? I'm the liar. I'm the bad guy. All of this is my fault."
"You're really just going to let her kill you? Like you think that somehow that'll make it all right?"
"What else is there?" he asked. "You don't know how it feels, Zack. I'll never be free from this as long as I'm alive."
"You think I don't know how it feels to ruin lives?" he challenged, voice tempered with anger. "I don't suppose you ever heard of Zackary Grant, then?"
Tanner shook his head, confused.
"That's right, you probably didn't hear of me in that small, backwoods town you lived in," he spat before suppressing his temper with a glare fixed on Tanner. "In Atlanta, though? Almost half the city knew who I was. They heard the name 'Zack Grant' and they always knew what that meant."
He hadn't expected this. "What did it mean?" Tanner's voice was still soft and injured as he asked the question, but he could feel the dynamic between Zack and himself shifting.
"It meant drugs," Zack said. "Almost any kind you could think of. All over downtown I sold whatever kind you needed, no questions asked, for however much I felt like charging that day. By the time the cops finally caught me I had to have had nearly twenty regular customers. Every single one of them hooked on my stuff and high as the sky. They were giving me their paychecks, credit cards, life savings, whatever money they had for just one more fix to keep that high going as long as they could. And I let them."
"You were arrested?" Tanner had managed to conquer the quivering of his voice.
"I did four years in West Central Prison. Dealt a few more drugs, got a few inmates hooked, but the guards never found out about it so I got to get out on parole early. 'Good behavior' they told me. I was ready to go back to my corner and start dealing again. Then, well, I'm sure you know what happened."
"The walkers came."
"Yeah." The regret was there. Tanner could see it if he looked close enough, but Zack was doing an excellent job of hiding it. "I didn't check in with my Parole Officer, I just hauled ass out of Atlanta. And on the outskirts of the city I met her."
"Lucy?"
"No, not Lucy," Zack said, shaking his head. "One of my customers. A regular. She had this nice orange hair and these cute freckles on her face. And she had one of those really noticeable southern accents." He smiled with the memory before looking down, shameful.
"Anyway," he continued, "She was just so… hooked. You could see how badly the drugs had messed her up on her face, and her arms had track marks and scars all over them. Atlanta was burning down less than a mile behind us. We could see the fire and we could even still hear people screaming, but she ignored it. She just grabbed my shirt and broke down begging for another fix. She was crying because she couldn't pay me for another syringe, promising me that she'd get me the money as soon as she could if I just gave her the juice now so that everything would be alright."
"That's, uh… that's… what did you do?"
"I wish I could say that I told her it didn't matter, that I took her with me and helped her get clean. But, and this is the part that I'll take to my grave, I just ran away." Hands clasped he carried on with the story in a somber, defeated tone. "I left her there. That was the moment I realized just what I had been doing on that street corner. I was ruining lives. The world was literally ending around her, but she didn't care. Seeing her like that is what finally made me see, but I couldn't deal with it. It was like looking all of my sins in the eye, and I flinched." His voice dropped and he cast his gaze over the floor at his feet. "Those people I dealt to, I let them give away everything they had in exchange for poison. It took the apocalypse to get me to realize that."
"That's why I volunteered to go on these long range supply runs with the Boss instead of sitting behind those metal walls up North. It's why I stayed behind after the bridge exploded to give her enough time to drag you to safety." He looked back up and pointed at Tanner. "I did those things for the same reason you came back for me when any sensible person would have given me up for dead. And it's the same reason you want to follow the Boss and let her shoot you dead."
"For atonement," Tanner grasped.
"Yeah," Zack told him. "Atonement. Forgiveness. Redemption. Call it whatever you want. For people like you and me, searching for it is the only thing that stops the past from eating up our insides until we're just hollow shells."
Zack's explanation rang true. Sapped of his emotional energy, all Tanner could do was offer a meek acknowledgement before gathering up what little power he had left to voice a single thought. "Will it ever be enough?"
"I have no idea," Zack admitted. "I've asked myself that question so many times and I just don't know. But let's make a deal, Tanner."
His tone was still sinking. "What kind of a deal?"
"You and me? We keep at it. We keep trying our best so that one day, maybe, we can look at ourselves in the mirror without having to turn away. Deal?"
From the hallway the two heard something fall to the floor. A few seconds later the air was permeated with violent, muffled sobbing.
"Deal," Tanner croaked.
